A bored network engineer caused a bit of a stir on the Internet in early 2013: they set up an IP
that when traceroute‘d returned the introductory text of Star Wars: Episode IV. Their
original implementation bounced
packets between two different routers, with a series of virtual routing tables. I don’t have access
to routers that are that configurable, but I thought this was super cool so I set out to make my own
version with just a single server in the cloud.

In May last year, a new attack on the Diffie Hellman algorithm was released, called
Logjam. At the time, I was working on a security team, so it was our
responsiblity to check that none of our servers would be affected. We ran through our TLS config and
decided it was safe, but also needed to check that our SSH config was too. That confused me – where
in SSH is Diffie Hellman? In fact, come to think of it, how does SSH work at all? As a fun side
project, I decided to answer that question by writing a very basic SSH client of my own.

As an Australian living in the US, I feel it’s my duty to introduce the treats of
my childhood to my co-workers: red frogs,
Fantales,
and Milo
have all made appearances. However, far and away the mostly highly voted treat
has been Tim Tams. Unfortunately, as an imported product, Tim Tams are pretty
expensive in the US - over US$8 a packet
on Amazon.
It’s not immediately clear where this cost comes from, so I decided to figure
out if I could sell them for less.

On another free weekend afternoon, I decided to finish off the rest of the
coreutils brainteasers I started last month. This
time I learned more about Linux audio, bash substring replacement, and the
assortment of flags that ls supports.

Reading through an article, What every computer science major should know,
I came across a couple of interesting coreutils brain teasers under “The Unix
philosophy” to play with of an evening. They turned out to be a great way to
learn about some more tools, and to brush up on some of those I already knew.